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SWF video to slow to load

Hi guys,

I have never had the opportunity to put video on a site before so im quite a newby. I have converted a WMV file into a SWF using flash encoder and Flash CS, embedding the video in to the SWF.

All works fine but when viewed online the video seems to take forever to load.
The video is 9mb running for about 4mins. Is there anyway i can speed this up or have a loading sequence just to say the video is loading.

Well the blacks bars top and bottom are now a part of the video. They come from using a standard aspect ratio (4:3) video camera and shooting in widesceen mode (16:9), or from importing widescreen footage and editing in a 4:3 format. Either way... not that desirable.
But sometimes we have to work with what we are given. As an alternative to cropping the video, I have modified a video player in Flash by simply laying rectangle bars over the top and bottom of the player. So on a layer above the video, place the rectangles, which are the same color as your Web page, in your case, white. When the video plays, those white bars will cover up the black bars, yet they will appear to just be part of the page.
Here's an example. Scroll down to the Virtual Tour video.http://www.sqis.net/
Green bars across top and bottom of player blend into page.
For your next video, if it's going to be wide screen, be sure they shoot with HD cam and correctly edit.
Best wishes,
Eye for Videowww.cidigitalmedia.com